[Reading] Reading Edward Rolf Tufte

Tufte is a specialist on information visualization and representation.
He successfully analyzes some famous historical cases in terms of information representation.

In an interview, Tufte told the stories about his first book, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information; his important steps to form his philosophy on writing books, and education.

He told the story about how Robert Merton, a great sociologist at Stanford University influenced his scholarship.

My scholarship changed in the 1970s while Iwas at the Center for
Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. Robert
Merton, the great sociologist, was also there. He taught me a great
deal about scholarship. It began when he looked over a manuscript
of what ultimately became my book on political economy, Political
Control of the Economy. Bob did a lot of editorial commenting and
was a wonderful editor and kind critic, one-on-one. Near a completely
undistinguished paragraph I had written, Bob wrote “an
echo of Veblen,” a distinguished social theorist. What this said to me
was not that the paragraph was good, but rather “Why don’t you try
playing in the big leagues?”—that is, to do work that might last for a
long time.
That thought has made an enormous difference to my work. It allowed
me to escape the scholarship of reprints and of last month’s
research journal. It transformed my sense of audience—I was not
writing for the dean or a few of my colleagues; I was writing for
something very different. It freed up my thinking to be able to have
ideas from 1610 and not just from 2004. Such a realization allowed
me to see much more of the world. It also sets a rather grand goal,
which is to try to do work that will last a long time.